North Korea, Libya Acquired N-tools

January 20, 2004
By Douglas Frantz, Los Angeles Times

Highly sensitive nuclear technology developed by a Netherlands company may have been transferred to Libya and North Korea, two government ministers acknowledged yesterday.

The disclosure in Parliament in Amsterdam marked the first public confirmation of assertions that centrifuge technology for enriching uranium apparently found its way to Libya and North Korea. It was already known that Pakistan and Iran had the technology.

The United States believes Iran and North Korea want nuclear weapons. Libya admitted in December that it had a nascent weapons program, while Pakistan tested a bomb in 1998.

Centrifuges are used to process uranium into fuel for reactors or fissile material for bombs. Most experts regard obtaining fissile material as the most-difficult step in building an atomic bomb.

Foreign Minister Bernard Bot and Economic Affairs Minister Laurens-Jan Brinkhorst said it was not clear how the potentially arms-related technology "from the 1970s" had been transferred.

Diplomats elsewhere said the comments were likely to increase pressure on Pakistan, which has been linked to Iran's capability and is suspected of passing the technology to North Korea and Libya.

U.S. officials have long suspected that Abdul Qadeer Khan, who led the development of Pakistan's atomic bomb, stole the centrifuge secrets while working for the Dutch company Urenco. He was convicted of the theft, but the verdict was overturned.

The Pakistani government has denied any official role in the transfer of technology and on Sunday arrested eight scientists. Khan, who has been questioned by the government, was not arrested. Pakistani officials have conceded that people who were trying to make money might have sold nuclear technology to Iran in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Urenco is a British-Dutch-German consortium, and officials said it has not been implicated in the spread of the centrifuge technology. A Urenco spokesman said yesterday that the company did not do business with Iran, Libya or North Korea and that the technology may have been passed to those countries by means outside its control.

In a related development, the United States and the U.N. atomic agency agreed yesterday to work together in examining, cataloging and scrapping Libya's nuclear-weapons program, ending the squabbling that followed Libya's renunciation of its program.

Under the agreement, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Mohamed ElBaradei will establish the scope and content of Libya's nuclear program. Once IAEA verification is complete, U.S. and British experts will remove suspect materials, ElBaradei said.

Material from Reuters is included in this report.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001840030_nuclear20.html